The Director, Benue Sports
Council, David Orngu, has urged sports authorities in the state to take urgent steps to enhance athletes’ performance for the upcoming National Sports Festival (NSF).
The 19th edition of the fiesta, tagged “Paradise Games” will be staged by Cross River in Calabar from November 23 to December 7.
Orngu told our correspondent on telephone that Benue’s contingent would prepare well and be a team to watch out for at the Games.
“We will start training our athletes now to avoid late preparations and also to improve on the results we had at the last festival and the National Youth Games in Abuja.
“Part of our plans is that we will organise zonal competitions to select athletes that will represent us at the festival,” he said.
Benue was 17th out the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory that participated in the last edition of the Games in Lagos, tagged “Eko 2012”.
According to Orngu, the state will operate an open camp system for now so that new athletes will be discovered to join those who usually represented it at major competitions.
The director said that sponsorship of sport programmes was a major challenge due to the low number of private organisations doing business in the state. “The biggest problem is that there are no companies that are ready to sponsor sports programmes,” Orngu said
He said that the few companies that were there were not willing to support any sports activity targeted at building budding talents.
“We depend completely on government funds and this affects us because we need private support as government cannot do it alone,” Orngu said.
He appealed to the government and corporate organisations to sponsor more national and state competitions to discover talents.